Epilogue

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On his first day as a civilian consultant for the CBI Patrick Jane spent the whole day downstairs with Human Resources. He'd been photographed, finger printed, DNA sampled, form-filled and computerized in various ways. He'd been given a psychological evaluation, surprised to learn the CBI had a full-time psychological counsellor and delighted that this week he was on compassionate leave, his place being filled by a different locum every day. Dr Louisa Mee had turned out to be a well-dressed psychologist in her early forties who had a terrible weakness for beautiful besuited blond men who smiled at her so dazzlingly and were apparently so well-adjusted, so open and honest about their feelings.

There was a wealth of very basic training courses that he had to attend before he was even permitted to ride the elevator up to the Serious Crimes Unit as an employee rather than a visitor. These were followed in short order by training on various protocols, from emergency procedures to inter-agency cooperation, followed after lunch by the computer software courses and finally the induction training that all new CBI employees had to endure. The highlight of the day had been when he persuaded one instructor to dig out a polygraph machine that was lurking in the corner of her training room then volunteered to take the test. Sadly it turned out the machine was faulty, they hadn't even been able to calibrate it...

Nearly the whole time when he hadn't been smiling he'd been grinning. He couldn't help himself. Rather than bothering to remember any of the training he'd spent his time daydreaming, speculating about what he might discover that they'd missed about Red John. He'd also amused himself seeing how long it took to raise a chuckle from each new member of staff that he met. He'd achieved a 100% success rate, while his fastest time was forty-three seconds after meeting one of them for the first time. Even being trained how to use the office coffee machines hadn't dampened his high spirits.

He laid on a serious charm offensive, making friends with the gals in HR, none of them under forty-five, and the men from IT, none of them over twenty-two. He'd listened to as much gossip as he could then pushed for a little more. He learned a surprising amount about Minelli, less about Lisbon though that did include news of Hannnigan's transfer out of her team. They'd been impressed by his reaction: nice Mr. Jane had looked genuinely concerned, said he was sorry to have caused trouble for anyone. He had apparently paid no attention at all to where the files for his team members were held in HR – standard filing cabinet locks – and looked away exaggeratedly when they typed in their passwords. The locks on the office doors were a variant he hadn't seen before, but that didn't matter because the lock on the key safe out near the reception desk wouldn't take him more than a few seconds and the only key it didn't appear to contain was the spare to the little safe behind the seascape in Minelli's office. Rather than being frustrated by the delays he'd found his first day interesting, amusing, instructive (though not in the way his instructors would have hoped) and bizarre, his first introduction to the kind of bureaucracy for which he was already developing creative avoidance strategies.

Now he was really here it was his job to treat the Red John files as a marathon not a sprint, any urgency he'd formerly felt replaced by a determination to be thorough. He was inexpressibly grateful to Senior Agent Lisbon for being the catalyst that had brought it all about. When he finally stepped out of the elevator into the Serious Crimes Unit at the end of the working day he even gave her a big hug. Yes he was genuinely grateful but he also wanted to confirm her reaction. He expected she would be uncomfortable, not because she found him attractive (though he suspected she might do) but because she didn't think it appropriate for colleagues to demonstrate feelings in the workplace like that. He was right, definitely not the hugging type. She led him to a store room full of the files and discretely left him there, a nice touch. If there was going to be a repeat of the scene when the files first arrived no-one would have to witness it.

Tonight he would read and start to memorise the files; after the first read-through he'd find out how empty the CBI building was overnight, exploring the layout of the building and the contents of its storage rooms; and maybe finally spend a few minutes back down in HR, getting the skinny on Lisbon, Cho and Rigsby – Minelli if he was fooling enough to allow them to keep his records there.

Patrick took the lid off the nearest box, pulled out a handful of manilla files, leaned back on an upended old couch propped in the corner of the room, and started reading.

- Finis -